Feeling punished for having alts...

[Melichoir]

This makes no sense. The game was made with a lot of flaws. The game was designed to not let us change jobs unless we were in a sanctuary. The game was designed to not let us call our chocobos out while we were in queue. The game was designed to not have a minimum item level for leveling dungeons.

They changed those things.

Yes, it is inconvenient. That is why we're asking the dev team to change it. I don't want to play other mmos, I'm asking for a change to the one MMO that I play. I pay for extra characters, I would like more features for the things that I pay for. I don't think we're being unreasonable. If alts were not meant to be a feature then they wouldn't be in the game.

But keep on with your strawmans. I don't mind if people have a valid reasoning to protest the request of a feature, but just saying you don't want it, just because, is not valid.

Either way you're keeping the thread on the front page so hopefully that will get us more attention.

Frankly saying they dont want it cause they feel itll change the core aspect of the game is just as valid as you saying you want it cause its QoL for you.

You dont have to agree with their point and can debate the aspects of it, but dont overly simplify their point to put yours in a better light.


This all being said, why is it that people want this stuff extended to alts? What is the point of having an alt currently? There was a fair argument for MSQ reasons, but thats gone cause NG+ is rectifying that issue. The cross world thing also helps solve some of this issue with having friends on different servers. It's not perfect but its an improvement. I havent personally seen a huge demand to be able to 're-level' everything you own as a good reason for alts, though Im sure theres a handful of people who would want that.

Now Im gonna be a bit cherry picking here to help highlight something:

I, for one, believe that this game, while clearly alt unfriendly, should be just a bit more accommodating for us who do have alts. Perhaps have limited transferrability of items across all our characters. (i.e. be able to mail things to ourselves/alts, allow our alts to join the FC we're in/we created, etc.)

This is why they dont encourage alts and why the consideration of the game design is important. They want you to rent extra retainers beyond 2 per character. If you could mail alts items or money, you could use your extra dollar or two sub to get yourself 14 extra retainers. This is also why they dont want you to easily invite yourself to an alts FC, because it makes it easier to abuse the FC system for more storage space among other things (like housing plots - which is also a s***-show and is something that does need to be addressed but thats a whole other topic). Having alts in this capacity and streamlining alts to function exactly like MMOs like WoW does would.

This game and many of its mechanics are designed specifically around a "one character" model. A lot of the auxillary services like more retainers is designed around this aspect. In WoW, having multiple alts made sense from that games design perspective because each character you made was locked to one single job. Youd have to reroll to play any new class. The ability to mail yourself stuff was probably a semi workaround for players that Blizzard went with so that if you started a new character it didnt feel as horrible starting from scratch. And part of the result of that were literal bank alts - alts who had 0 purpose other than have more bank space.

Now that model doesnt work for FFXIV because they designed the game to operate where you need only 1 character.

So when people say "Doing stuff that caters to alts is not in the games design", theyre not wrong. The game isnt really designed for alts. It was designed for a single character, but gave players the option to have alts IF they wanted to do something like replay the MSQ.

I guess the question I want to know is why do people want alts outside of reasons that would exploit or bypass mogstation or account features (such as more inventory space or replaying the MSQ)?